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NASA NTRS2011

Cryogenic Thermal Distortion Model Validation for the JWST ISIM Structure

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) Structure is a precision optical metering structure for the JWST science instruments. Optomechanical performance requirements place stringent limits on the allowable thermal distortion of the metering structure. A significant effort was completed to develop capabilities to predict and metrologize cryogenic thermal distortion of the ISIM Structure. This paper focuses on thermal distortion finite element modeling, analysis, and model validation. Extensive thermal distortion analysis was completed during the design phase for the ISIM Structure to demonstrate that thermal distortion requirements were achieved. Comparison of measurements from recently completed cryogenic testing and model predictions demonstrate the adequacy of thermal distortion modeling uncertainty factors adopted during the design phase, and provide bounds on the accuracy of the model predictions. This paper will provide an overview of the test configurations, describe the thermal distortion models of the tests, and provide a comparison of test results and analytical predictions from the models.

Johnston, John D.↗
NASA NTRS2009

Cryogenic Pupil Alignment Test Architecture for Aberrated Pupil Images

A document describes cryogenic test architecture for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) integrated science instrument module (ISIM). The ISIM element primarily consists of a mechanical metering structure, three science instruments, and a fine guidance sensor. One of the critical optomechanical alignments is the co-registration of the optical telescope element (OTE) exit pupil with the entrance pupils of the ISIM instruments. The test architecture has been developed to verify that the ISIM element will be properly aligned with the nominal OTE exit pupil when the two elements come together. The architecture measures three of the most critical pupil degrees-of-freedom during optical testing of the ISIM element. The pupil measurement scheme makes use of specularly reflective pupil alignment references located inside the JWST instruments, ground support equipment that contains a pupil imaging module, an OTE simulator, and pupil viewing channels in two of the JWST flight instruments. Pupil alignment references (PARs) are introduced into the instrument, and their reflections are checked using the instrument's mirrors. After the pupil imaging module (PIM) captures a reflected PAR image, the image will be analyzed to determine the relative alignment offset. The instrument pupil alignment preferences are specularly reflective mirrors with non-reflective fiducials, which makes the test architecture feasible. The instrument channels have fairly large fields of view, allowing PAR tip/tilt tolerances on the order of 0.5deg.

Bos, Brent↗
NASA NTRS2021

Status of the James Webb Space Telescope Mission

The James Webb Space Telescope ( Webb) is the largest space telescope realized to-date, with a 6.5 m segmented primary mirror that must be folded to fit within its Ariane 5 launcher fairing. This infrared telescope is passively cooled using a five-layer sunshield that will keep the optical telescope and its four science instruments in the shade throughout the lifetime of the mission in an L2 orbit. Webb's science instruments include near- and mid­ infrared imagers and spectrometers that cover the spectral range from 0.6-28.5 µm. The Webb mission has a long history with numerous first of its kind technology developments, ground support equipment innovations, and algorithmic characterization advances. This conference proceeding summarizes the technical progress over the past two years, from the Spacecraft Element environmental testing to the Observatory integration and testing, and the final Observatory test plans leading up to launch, on-orbit commissioning, and science operations.

Michael W McElwain↗
NASA NTRS1991

Solar-A Prelaunch Mission Operation Report (MOR)

The Solar-A mission is a Japanese-led program with the participation of the United States and the United Kingdom. The Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) is providing the Solar-A spacecraft, two of the four science instruments, the launch vehicle and launch support, and the principal ground station with Operational Control Center. NASA is providing a science instrument, the Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT)and tracking support using the Deep Space Network (DSN) ground stations. The United Kingdom s Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) provides the Bragg Crystal Spectrometer. The Solar-A mission will study solar flares using a cluster of instruments on a satellite in a 600 km altitude, 31 degree inclination circular orbit. The emphasis of the mission is on imaging and spectroscopy of hard and soft X-rays. The principal instruments are a pair of X-ray imaging instruments, one for the hard X-ray range and one for the soft X-ray range. The Hard X-Ray Telescope (HXT), provided by ISAS, operates in the energy range of 10-100 keV and uses an array of modulation collimators to record Fourier transform images of the non-thermal and hot plasmas that are formed during the early phases of a flare. These images are thought to be intimately associated with the sites of primary energy release. The Soft X-Ray Telescope (SXT), jointly provided by NASA and ISAS, operates in the wavelength range of 3-50 Angstroms and uses a grazing incidence mirror to form direct images of the lower temperature (but still very hot) plasmas that form as the solar atmosphere responds to the injection of energy. The SXT instrument is a joint development effort between the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. The U.S. effort also involves Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Hawaii, who provide support in the areas of theory, data analysis and interpretation, and ground-based observations. The hard and soft X-ray telescopes both have an alignment sensor, operating in the visual region of the spectrum, to provide co-alignment information.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2022

Juno Gravity Science: Five Years of Radio Science Operations with Ka-band Uplink

Since entering orbit on July 4, 2016, the Juno spacecraft has executed 34 closest approach passes of Jupiter, completing the prime mission. During each closest approach, called perijove, the spacecraft comes within 4,000 km of the cloud tops and the motion of the spacecraft becomes perturbed by the gravitational field of Jupiter. These small changes in the motion of the spacecraft are detected using the Juno Gravity Science Instrument by measuring the Doppler shift of the radio link between the Juno spacecraft and NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). During a majority of these closest approach passes, the 34-meter DSS-25 antenna transmits simultaneous X-band and Ka-band uplink to the spacecraft. Juno’s onboard X-band transponder and Ka-band translator phase-coherently return the signals back to Earth for reception at the same DSS-25 antenna. The precise frequency of these signals is measured by processing open-loop recordings of the signal. These measurements, characterized by ~5-10 micron/sec accuracies (after calibration of charged particle noise and Earth troposphere), have probed the gravity field of Jupiter to unprecedented precision, allowing for discoveries of Jupiter’s core size and depth of the zonal winds. Successful operations of the instrument during perijoves requires careful planning and coordination between DSN engineers, the Juno project, and the Juno science team. This work discusses the operations of the Juno Gravity Science Instrument after five years of prime mission operations. Lessons learned are documented to be applied to future missions and the Juno extended mission. Although the Juno extended mission formally started on August 1, 2021, on June 7, 2021, the trajectory was modified with a flyby of Ganymede, the third Galilean moon of Jupiter. Gravity and radio science investigations of Jupiter and its moons will continue to play a key role in Juno’s objectives during the extended mission.

Oudrhiri, Kamal↗
NASA NTRS2004

GRACE KBR and Accelerometer Data Reduction and Calibration

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), launched on March 17, 2002, represents the state-of-the-art in geodetic observations of the static and time varying components of the Earth's geopotential field. The fundamental measurement used to observe gravity is the inter-satellite range and range rate between two coplanar, low altitude satellites obtained from a K-band ranging (KBR) system. In addition to the K-band ranging system, each satellite possess a Super-STAR Accelerometer, a GPS receiver/antenna package, Star Cameras and a Laser Retro Reflector (LRR) to complete the compliment of science instruments. The GRACE project has now released two years of Level 1B data derived from the science instruments and sensors. An integral component of our time variable gravity research is the reduction, calibration and analyses of these Level 1B data. In particular we have analyzed several months of K-band ranging (KBR1B), accelerometry (ACC1B) and GPS navigation (GNAV1B) data. Accelerometer calibration and KBR data reduction methodology and results will be presented. We discuss the impact of these analyses on the recovery of time variable gravity.

Rowlands, David D.↗
NASA NTRS2009

Non-invasive Optical End-to-End Test of a Large TMA Telescope (JWST) from the Intermediate Focus

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) requires testing of the full optical system in a cryogenic vacuum environment before launch. Challenges with the telescope architecture and the test environment lead to placing removable optical test sources at the Cassegrain intermediate focus of the Telescope. The Science Instrument suite will be used to align the telescope and to verify the wavefront error. The Science Instruments capture test images that are analyzed using focus diverse phase retrieval. The wavefront sensing algorithms have the large dynamic range required to measure the relatively small wavefronts of interest in the presence of the large aberrations resulting from the off-axis source locations at the intermediate focus. These inherent aberrations of the off-axis design are removed analytically from the measured data. The test design and in-situ wavefront sensing process enables a number of tests to verify the alignment and optical quality of the system.

Whitman, Tony↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Mineralogical Trends Over the Clay-Sulfate Transition in Gale Crater from the Mars Science Laboratory CheMin Instrument

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover landed in Gale crater in 2012 to explore a sedimentary sequence in lower Aeolis Mons (informally known as Mount Sharp)that shows changes in mineralogy from orbital visible/near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy[1]. Sedimentary layers with spectral signatures of hydrated Mg sulfate overly layers with signatures of Fe/Mg smectite, a mineralogical stratigraphy that is seen in other ancient sedimentary rocks across Mars[e.g., 2-4]. Curiosity recently completed its campaign in a valley with a strong orbital signature of smectite, named Glen Torridon. Mineralogical measurements by the CheMin X-ray diffractometer(XRD), complemented by evolved gas analyses by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite, allowed the identification of abundant Fe3+-bearing dioctahedral smectite (i.e., nontronite) in Glen Torridon [5-6]. Curiosity left Glen Torridon in February 2021 and began traversing through a “clay-sulfate transition” zone on the way to the pediment and the sulfate unit[e.g., 7]. This clay-sulfate transition is defined in orbital reflectance spectroscopy as having a weak signature of hydrated Mg sulfate. Curiosity has drilled five outcrops over the traverse through the clay-sulfate transition and delivered the rock powders to CheMin for mineralogical analysis. Here, we report on the mineral assemblages of those five targets derived from CheMin XRD patterns and discuss mineralogical trends as the rover approaches the sulfate unit.

Mars↗
NASA NTRS2010

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) Overview

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration s (NASA) Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) launched on June 18, 2009 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas V launch vehicle and into a direct insertion trajectory to the oon. LRO, which was designed, built, and operated by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, is gathering crucial data on the lunar environment that will help astronauts prepare for long-duration lunar expeditions. The mission has a nominal life of 1 year as its seven instruments find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and test new technology. To date, LRO has been operating well within the bounds of its requirements and has been collecting excellent science data images taken from the LRO Camera Narrow Angle Camera of the Apollo landing sites appeared on cable news networks. A significant amount of information on LRO s science instruments is provided at the LRO mission webpage. LRO s Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) subsystem is made up of an onboard attitude control system (ACS) and a hardware suite of sensors and actuators. The LRO onboard ACS is a collection of algorithms based on high level and derived requirements, and reflect the science and operational events throughout the mission lifetime. The primary control mode is the Observing mode, which maintains the lunar pointing orientation and any offset pointing from this baseline. It is within this mode that all science instrument calibrations, slews and science data is collected. Because of a high accuracy requirement for knowledge and pointing, the Observing mode makes use of star tracker (ST) measurement data to determine an instantaneous attitude pointing. But even the star trackers alone do not meet the tight requirements, so a six-state Kalman Filter is employed to improve the noisy measurement data. The Observing mode obtains its rate information from an inertial reference unit (IRU) and in the event of an IRU failure, the rate data is be derived from the star tracker, but with degraded pointing performance. The Delta-V control mode responsibility is to maintain attitude pointing during the cruise trajectory, insertion burns and lunar orbit maintenance by adjustments made to the spacecraft s velocity magnitude and vector direction. The ACS also provides for a thruster based system momentum management algorithm (known as Delta-H) to maintain the system and wheel momentum to within acceptable levels. In the event an anomaly causes the LRO spacecraft to lose the ability to maintain its current attitude pointing, a Sun Safe mode is included in the ACS for the purpose of providing a known power and thermally safe coarse inertial sun attitude for an indefinite period of time, within the manageable limits of the reaction wheels. The Sun Safe mode is also the initial spacecraft control mode off of the launch vehicle and provides for a means to null tip-off rates immediately after separation. The nominal configuration is to use the IRU for rate information in the controller. In the event of a gyro failure a gyroless control mode was developed that computes rate information from the CSS data.

Garrick, Joseph↗
NASA NTRS1993

Workshop on advanced technologies for planetary instruments

NASA's robotic solar system exploration program requires a new generation of science instruments. Design concepts are now judged against stringent mass, power, and size constraints--yet future instruments must be highly capable, reliable, and, in some applications, they must operate for many years. The most important single constraint, however, is cost: new instruments must be developed in a tightly controlled design-to-cost environment. Technical innovation is the key to success and will enable the sophisticated measurements needed for future scientific exploration. As a fundamental benefit, the incorporation of breakthrough technologies in planetary flight hardware will contribute to U.S. industrial competitiveness and will strengthen the U.S. technology base. The Workshop on Advanced Technologies for Planetary Instruments was conceived to address these challenges, to provide an open forum in which the NASA and DoD space communities could become better acquainted at the working level, and to assess future collaborative efforts. Over 300 space scientists and engineers participated in the two-and-a-half-day meeting held April 28-30, 1993, in Fairfax, Virginia. It was jointly sponsored by NASA's Solar System Exploration Division (SSED), within the Office of Space Science (OSS); NASA's Office of Advanced Concepts and Technology (OACT); DoD's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), now called the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO); and the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI). The meeting included invited oral and contributed poster presentations, working group sessions in four sub-disciplines, and a wrap-up panel discussion. On the first day, the planetary science community described instrumentation needed for missions that may go into development during the next 5 to 10 years. Most of the second day was set aside for the DoD community to inform their counterparts in planetary science about their interests and capabilities, and to describe the BMDO technology base, flight programs, and future directions. The working group sessions and the panel discussion synthesized technical and programmatic issues from all the presentations, with a specific goal of assessing the applicability of BMDO technologies to science instrumentation for planetary exploration.

Appleby, J.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Definitive Mineralogy from the Mars Science Laboratory Chemin Instrument

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover will land in Gale Crater on Mars in August 2012. The planned landing site is an alluvial fan near the base of the crater's central mound. Orbital remote sensing of this 5 km high mound indicates the presence of hydrated sulfates, interstratified with smectite and hematite-bearing layers. Minerals formed in an aqueous environment are of particular interest given that water is a fundamental ingredient of living systems and that MSL's prime science objective is to investigate martian habitability.

Yen, A. S.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Mineralogy of the Greenheugh Pediment and Underlying Murray Formation from the Mars Science Laboratory CheMin Instrument

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover has been investigating a sequence of ancient fluvio-lacustrine and eolian units in Gale crater. For much of the mission, Curiosity has studied the fluvio-lacustrine deposits of the Murray formation. Curiosity has also studied the ancient eolian Stimson formation in a few locations, which unconformably overlies the Murray fm. The Stimson formation was previously studied at the Naukluft and Emerson Plateaus and recently studied at the Greenheugh pediment capping unit. The Curiosity science team also investigated the Murray formation directly underlying the pediment. Curiosity drilled the “Edinburgh” target within the pediment capping unit and the “Hutton” target in the Murray formation near the contact with the pediment and delivered these materials to the CheMin X-ray diffractometer to characterize bulk mineralogy. Edinburgh contains abundant plagioclase, pyroxene, magnetite, olivine, and X-ray amorphous materials, with 10 wt.% smectite and minor sanidine. The mineralogy of the Stimson at Greenheugh is distinct from the mineralogy of the Stimson at Naukluft and Emerson because previous Stimson targets did not contain olivine or clay minerals. This suggests sediments in the pediment may have a different source and/or different aqueous alteration history than those from Naukluft and Emerson. Hutton contains abundant plagioclase, pyroxene, magnetite, and X-ray amorphous materials, 6 wt.% smectite, and minor cristobalite, opal-CT, sanidine, hematite, fluorapatite, and anhydrite. Other Murray targets in the surrounding Glen Torridon region that are farther from the pediment contact contain ~30 wt.% smectite and lack cristobalite and opal-CT. Cristobalite and/or opal-CT are present in a few other targets elsewhere along the traverse, including the top of the nearby Vera Rubin ridge and the top of the Pahrump Hills outcrop. Stimson overlies the Pahrump Hills, and, based on projections of the pediment slope, the Stimson may have overlain Vera Rubin ridge. The proximity of the low-smectite and cristobalite- and/or opal-CT-bearing outcrops to the contact between the Murray and Stimson suggests the contact provided a conduit for diagenetic fluids that altered clay minerals and formed crystalline and paracrystalline silica.

E. B. Rampe↗
NASA NTRS2026

Diamond-Loaded Polyimide Aerogel Scattering Filters and Their Applications in Astrophysical and Planetary Science Observations

Infrared-blocking, aerogel-based scattering filters have a broad range of potential applications in astrophysics and planetary science instruments in the far-infrared, sub-millimeter, and microwave regimes. This paper demonstrates the ability of conductively-loaded, polyimide aerogel filters to meet the mechanical and science instrument requirements for several experiments, including the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), the Experiment for Cryogenic Large-Aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM), and the Sub-millimeter Solar Observation Lunar Volatiles Experiment (SSOLVE). Thermal multi-physics simulations of the filters predict their performance when integrated into a cryogenic receiver. Prototype filters have survived cryogenic cycling to 4 K with no degradation in mechanical properties. Measurement of total hemispherical reflectance and transmittance, as well as cryogenic tests of the aerogel filters in a full receiver context, allow estimates of the integrated infrared emissivity of the filters. Knowledge of the emissivity will help instrument designers incorporate the filters into future experiments in planetary science, astrophysics, and cosmology.

Kyle R Helson↗
NASA NTRS1992

OASIS-CC presentation

The Operations and Science Instrument Support (OASIS) project is a long-term effort to help produce operations capabilities that can support space science missions of the next century. Portions of the OASIS concept in software have been implemented under the general name OASIS-R/T. OASIS-CC is the OASIS Command and Control, for monitoring and controlling science instruments and spacecraft during test, integration, launch and on-orbit operations. Viewgraphs are presented on the OASIS-CC functionality description, OASIS-CC support, and OASIS-CC as a tool.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2022

Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover SHERLOC Instrument Isolation System

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) successfully landed the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover at Jezero Crater on the Martian surface. Perseverance’s main mission objective is to cache Martian rock and regolith samples in hermetically sealed tubes to be brought back to Earth by future missions. To achieve this goal the rover is equipped with a 2-meter-long Robotic Arm (RA) which manipulates the Turret to interact with the surface. The Turret is comprised of science instruments and tools that enable surface sampling and science. The backbone of the Turret hardware is the Rotary Percussive Coring Drill. The science instruments, which are directly mounted to the structural housing of this drill, must be able to withstand not only the launch and entry, descent and landing (EDL) loads of the vehicle but also the dynamic percussive environment, induced by the drill throughout surface operations. This paper discusses the technical hardware design, development and testing of a vibration isolation system to protect the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) Instrument from these dynamic environments. The hardware design aspect of this problem was limited by both size and mass constraints. The Turret is tightly configured and the physical space in which hardware can reside is restricted due to multiple axes of surface interaction points. Another driving requirement is the extreme range of thermal non-operational environment from -135C to +90C. This, in addition to SHERLOC being a heavier instrument than previously integrated on a turret, made the use of isolation systems employed on previous rover missions problematic. The final design incorporates custom wire mesh springs preloaded within titanium hexapod struts equipped with flexure ends. Custom versions of commercially available wire mesh springs were designed and tested. These custom springs differed in dimension, density and stiffness from the off the shelf options. The newly designed springs went through various stages of flight acceptance testing. Detailed physics-based modeling to understand what loads the isolation system would experience was used to define the test conditions for the springs and entire isolation subsystem. The testing program developed around this was extensive to fully characterize the isolation performance over cleanliness levels, temperature and life. Another major aspect of this work was developing a method of replicating the drill’s percussive environment for performance and life testing of Turret mounted hardware. Attaching the instrument to an operating drill for testing was not a viable option. A method of using a Highly Accelerated Life Test (HALT) table was developed and applied across the project as the most representative and tunable option to physically simulate this new environment. This method, along with launch environment random vibration testing, was used to build an entire dynamic qualification and flight hardware test program. The results of the design, modeling, testing and analysis of the SHERLOC Isolation System is described throughout the following paper.

Krafchak, Todd↗
NASA NTRS2020

The Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope

The Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) instrument on the Spitzer Space Telescope covered the 5 to 38 micron wavelength range at low and medium spectral resolutions. The instrument was very popular during Spitzer’s 5.7 year-long cold mission. Every year it attracted the most proposals, and garnered more observing hours, of any of the science instruments. This success was the culmination of a very long development period, where the instrument design changed radically. When the instrument was first selected by NASA in 1984 it was very complicated. As part of the overall reduction of the size of the SIRTF Observatory following its recovery from the mission’s cancellation in 1991 the IRS became smaller and much, much simpler. The only aspect of the instrument that increased from the original design was the pixel count of the detectors. The new, lean, IRS based on eight axioms: (1) SIRTF is a cost-driven mission; (2) Only Boeing Si:As and Si:Sb 128x128 BIB arrays shall be used; (3) The IRS has all Aluminum housing and optics; (4) Simple optics consisting of surfaces of revolution, flat gratings, and “bolt-and-go” tolerances; (5) No moving parts; (6) Redundancy only for credible single-point failures; (7) Strive for an observing efficiency of 80%; (8) The IRS shall be capable of internal health assessment. This led to a simple, robust, but still extremely powerful final instrument composed of four distinct modules. Many of the features developed for the IRS were subsequently employed in other spacecraft and SOFIA science instrumentation. This presentation will cover the developmental history of the IRS instrument, its final design and performance, and will especially highlight the sage decisions that Jim Houck made along the way that led to its highly successful career on the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Roellig, Thomas L.↗
NASA NTRS1982

Galileo spacecraft pointing accuracy analysis

This paper describes the analysis required to evaluate the pointing performance of the Galileo spacecraft science instruments and antenna. The main contribution lies in the development of the models needed for pointing analysis. Pointing control mechanisms of the science instruments, as well as the spacecraft autonomous attitude determination process and the pointing control mechanisms for the high gain antenna, are provided in order to identify the various error sources involved. A covariance analysis method is then used to obtain the pointing capabilities of the instruments and the antenna. The results are depicted in tabular form to compare the capabilities against the levied requirements.

Hayati, S. A.↗
NASA NTRS2006

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission Operations: Architecture and Approach

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was launched on August 12, 2005 by an Atlas V launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. MRO will carry a rich set of science instruments to Mars and provide global, regional survey, and targeted observations. In addition, a set of engineering instruments providing optical navigation, Ka band telecommunication and UHF relay services to future Mars missions are part of the MRO payload. During the mission, the MRO operations teams are presented with two major challenges - unprecedented high data rate and data volumes, and complex science planning and resource sharing. MRO has the capability to communicate with earth at a maximum of six Megabits per second (> 50 times any previous Mars missions). With the current Deep Space Network (DSN) contact schedule of 19 eight-hour tracks per week, the baseline mission plan is for MRO to return 34 Terabits of raw science data during the two year primary science phase. Each of the science instruments has its unique requirements for global mapping, regional survey, and targeted observations. Some instruments prefer nadir-only observations, while others require off-nadir observations (especially for stereo viewing). The requirements from these Mars viewing instruments presented a significant challenge for the operations team to design the complex science planning and resource sharing/allocation process. This paper describes what MRO project is implementing to solve these challenges.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)↗